Transcription
[Music] [Applause] [Music]
You know, I've been around for a while. I've met some interesting people, done some crazy things. You'd think that there wasn't much that could take me by surprise. You'd be wrong.
[Music]
The world is full of stories and science and things that amazing confound me every single day. Incredible mysteries that keep me awake at night. Some I can answer, and others just defy logic. Do the dead haunt everyday objects in Atlanta? The pilots of crashed airlin to return from the grave? I know what I saw was real. Can an airplane be possessed? In Britain, a near fatal attack on a boy is blamed on a painting. They felt this force in his buck, something that pushed him down the stairs. Can a work of art harbor demons? And after an earthquake in New Zealand, a man is attacked by a ghost. What I could feel was I was getting strangled. Do natural disasters release spectral energy? Yeah, it's a weird world, and I love it.
[Music] [Music]
Have you ever seen a ghost, or something that you think as a ghost? Well, let me tell you, my house is full of them. That was a that was a big one. Yeah, they're everywhere. Make my day, spirit boy. Yeah, they're in the walls, in the floors. You never know where they're going to turn up. So you need to be prepared, right? But not all ghost are products of Hollywood. Millions of us claim we've not only encountered them in our homes, but almost anywhere and in anything. Can bricks and mortar or other inanimate objects be leens for the spirits? Are they contained in everything around us? I don't know, but I I do know this: the one place you don't want to find them is on an airplane.
Summer 1973. Eastern Airlines flight attendant Enid Griek is working a busy shift. We flew Portland, Seattle, Seattle, Omaha, and then Omaha, St. Louis, and then St. Louis, Atlanta. Although Greg loves her job, tonight she's feeling under the weather. I had stomach flu or something, so I asked the senior flight attendant if I could go down in the galley and just get away. And she says, well, the flight's really light, so why don't you go down there and, you know, hang out for a bit. So I went downstairs and I just laid down. I was laying there for a while. I don't know whether I had fallen off to sleep or not.
Suddenly, Enid is aware that something isn't right. Although she came down alone, she senses another presence in the galley. Someone is watching her. All of a sudden, I see a pilot standing at down at my feet. And I'm like, oh my God, I'm embarrassed. You know, I'm down here sleeping. I'm not supposed to be doing this. Not only has she been napping on the job, she's been caught by the captain. Enid is mortified. There was just, uh, no communication between the two of us. It was just him standing there, kind of like watching me. And then he just moved off.
Desperate to make amends, Enid consults a fellow attendant. I went over and I said, Linda, I said, didn't you see that pilot down here? She says, there was any pilot down here. I said, yes, there was. I saw him. Frustrated and confused, Ena decides to apologize to the captain. I went straight into the cockpit and asked them, did you guys, were you downstairs? And they said, no. And I knew the guys, I knew they wouldn't lie to me.
So who did Enid see in the galley? Had she imagined the entire incident? There weren't any other pilots on the plane. The uniform looked like it was brand new. The stripes were bright yellow. It was very real. I wasn't asleep when I saw him. I don't believe in ghosts, but I know what I saw was real.
So it seems did many others around the same time as Enid's encounter. Reports come in of strange apparitions on other Eastern airplanes. Neil Holland is a former Eastern Airlines pilot. There were some people that reported unusual events on that airplane, not only in the galley, but in the a of the airplane. The reports have one thing in common: witnesses say they recognize the ghostly pilots. They are Captain Bob Loft and flight engineer Don Repo. Every Eastern employee knows who they are because Bob and Dawn are dead. They were killed when Eastern Flight 401 crashed into the Florida Everglades in 1972. Even a vice president of Eastern Airlines saw what they said was a ghost of Captain LOF and also, uh, Second Officer Don repo.
Eastern Flight 401 departed Kennedy Airport December 29th, 1972, non-stop from Miami, Florida, and it had 176 passengers on on board. The airplane, that's the crew and the passenger account, and it arrived in Miami at about 11:30 that evening. Uh, everything was going fine for the flight until on final approach when the gear was lowered. Uh, there was the ab of the nose gear light. And of course, the crew called for a go around because the gear was unsafe. Uh, they thought at the time. Uh, when the airplane was then, uh, cleared out into an area to explore what the situation really was, the airplane inadvertently, uh, after the autopilot had been put on, was bumped off. And the airplane, without the crew noticing, started a slow descent until, uh, about three or four minutes after the ground, the airplane hit into the Everglades. Its left wing and, uh, it crashed. Um, at at that time, there were 69 passengers that survived out of 173. The entire flight crew eventually passed. Boobop was killed.
Throughout the summer of '73, more Eastern employees report ghostly appearances. There was a pilot in next to the passenger, and all of a sudden the pilot disappeared. And that pilot was reported to have been Captain Bob Loft. Some of the sightings are so terrifying, they disrupt airline operations. They cancel one flight because of the appearance. Uh, it shook up, uh, a flight attendant and the crew. Whether it was Don repo or Captain LOF, I'm not certain of that.
As the ghost story spread, Eastern Airlines tries to limit the damage. But then the airline makes a stunning admission. It salvaged undamaged equipment from the wreckage of Flight 401 and had it installed in other aircraft in the fleet. A lot of the galley parts were put in other airplanes, and some of the, uh, electronics was put in the, the other airplanes. Then an even more disturbing fact emerges. Most of the ghost sightings are taking place in and around the recycled parts, especially in the aircraft gys. One of the flight attendants actually saw one of the appearances, uh, of Don repo. He appeared in one of the ovens looking out, and that pretty much shook her up.
Needless to say, management did not like what was happening as far as rumors about this airplane and the stories that were developing as a result of these parts being in put in these other aircraft. And so I'm sure they, there were, there was pressure from management, uh, that don't tell stories about this airplane. I never was threatened by any of the management of Eastern Airlines.
The outcry over the ghost sightings forces Eastern to remove the reclaimed components from its fleet. The reports of apparitions plummet, but not entirely. The stories continued until the demise of Eastern Airlines in 1991. And I have heard that some of the other carriers that actually received some of our equipment were also seeing sightings.
What a fascinating story. This is weird, or what? Can mechanical parts be haunted by souls involved in accidents? And if it can happen on planes, can it happen in other vehicles? Just last week, I was, I was driving through the canyon and boom, out of nowhere, I felt something go under the wheels. And I, I, I never found it. Did ghosts from a crashed plane haunt Eastern Airlines flights?
Paranormal researcher Teresa Bane is the author of the Encyclopedia of Demons. I believe that there are things that happen that we can't rationally explain, just because as human beings, we don't have the, the biology to fully understand everything that's happening in our world. Bane is in no doubt about the origins of the ghosts of Flight 401. She thinks they're a paranormal phenomenon that attached itself to parts salvaged from the crash. It's called a multi-dimensional hologram. Multi-dimensional holograms are what some people call ghosts, and it's when a human's energy is transferred and imprinted upon a place or an object and is able to penetrate the veil between dimensions.
Bane says that unlike a ghost, these types of apparition cannot actually speak or react to human beings. That would explain why the ghostly captain didn't say a word to Enid in the galley. I don't believe that any of the ghosts could have interacted freely with any of the witnesses at any point because it's like a recording. You can listen to your favorite records, and you know where all the pops and cracks are, but you can't interact with them.
But how did the aircraft parts get imprinted with these phantom recordings? Bane thinks had happened during the final moments of Flight 401 as Captain Bob LOF struggled to save his plane. Captain Bob's final moments had to be absolutely terrifying and horrific. He had these lives of these people at stake. He had to do everything he could to to save them. And he, he knew he was not going to be able [Music] to.
Bane theorizes the dying captain's psychic energy was so strong it had the power to defy the laws of physics in his final moments. When he did expire, and that energy was released, it had to be a tremendous explosion. And with such energy and force that it must have been released, and I have no doubt whatsoever that it embedded in those objects. Can the ghosts of Flight 401 be a residual haunting? Can tragedies imprint images of the dead onto inanimate objects, or does the answer to this mystery lie elsewhere?
We have patients who are actually referred because they believe they're seeing ghosts. Crews report mysterious apparitions on Eastern Airlines flights. Were the aircraft haunted by souls of dead pilots? Sleep specialist Dr. Charles Samuels doesn't think so. Personally, I do not believe in ghosts. We have patients who are actually referred because they believe they're seeing ghosts, and this is called a hypnogogic hallucination, and it occurs in very specific situations. And in two of the cases that I can remember of a few, they're actually related to the withdrawal of significant street drugs.
But he does believe flight crews were having visions. These people could, uh, perceive that they saw ghosts where, in fact, it really was more a hallucination. But what could have caused the hallucinations? It could be something flight crews suffer from more than almost any other profession: sleep disruption. People in the airline industry clearly are exposed to situations where they don't get enough sleep, but they're also sleeping at a different time or awake at a different time. This leads to the disruption of one of the body's most delicate mechanisms: the biological clock, or the circadian rhythm.
The circadian rhythm is our daily biological rhythm, which is, uh, controlled by a specific part of the brain. And it's that place in the brain that sets our clock every day. And human beings have to have their clock set every day. Circadian rhythm is controlled by a part of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or SCN. Sunlight comes through the eye to the retina. It sends a signal back to the SCN, and that's what sets up the clock every day. But when humans are sleep-deprived and their biological clock isn't reset, Dr. Samuels thinks the brain goes haywire, leading to a state where people experience hallucinations. These boundaries don't exist between wake and sleep as concrete as we think they do. They do overlap, and this is an example of one where people would say, I saw a ghost, where, in fact, it was the brain having the dream part of sleep during wake.
Could sleep deprivation account for the sightings of Flight 401's dead pilots? And if so, why did they stop after the airline removed the salvage parts? Ophthalmologist Dr. Andrew Do agrees that hallucinations are behind the Flight 401 ghost sightings. When I first heard the story about the ghosts, I immediately felt that these people were not lying to them. It was a very real event. But he thinks they're caused by high energy radiation from outer space, known as cosmic rain. Cosmic radiation is radiation that's released by the sun through sunspots and solar activity, and also by other areas in our galaxy where supernovas explode.
Dr. Do is convinced this high energy radiation is especially hazardous for pilots and flight attendants. The higher you are above the plane of the Earth, the more cosmic rays that there are. Flight crews fly at high altitudes, therefore they are subject to higher levels of cosmic radiation than the normal person. In addition, they fly over the poles on flights between Asia and North America, let's say, or South America and Australia. And the levels of cosmic radiation are much higher at the poles because of some irregularities in the Earth's magnetic field.
Dr. Do is certain the radiation has a devastating impact on the eyes, causing cataracts, where the lens of the eye clouds over. Flight crews are three times more likely to develop cataracts than the normal population. But how do cataracts cause hallucinations? The answer could be a rare condition known as Charles Bonnet Syndrome, where the brain compensates for vision loss by creating its own images. There was a Swiss philosopher by the name of Charles Bonnet, who lived in the 18th century, whose grandfather had limited vision. And Charles Bonnet's grandfather would described to him, with his limited vision, all the things that he could see: people, faces, imaginary things, things he'd seen in the past, strange objects. And we know now that this happens in people who have significantly decreased vision. It's called the Charles Bonnet Syndrome. And as we look at this phenomenon, um, we realize that it doesn't necessarily happen in people who've had long-standing visual loss. Um, we have found that if you close your eyes or you dream, your brain by itself, with your eyes closed, produces visual images. And those may be visual images such as we dream about, which may be a loved one or a long departed one, something we've never seen, something we can only imagine. And you can, the brain puts these images out all the time, continuously. When our eyes are open, the images from our eyes are stronger than those emanating from our brain. But when we close our eyes, or when it's darker, sometimes the images from the brain supersede the images from our eyes and fill things in or replace things. A flight attendant that's waking up, visions, a little blurry, darkened area, will see something, and their brain will fill in the difference and come up with a ghostly image, which their brain is manufacturing, which will seem perfectly real to them.
Were the ghosts of Flight 401 only dancing across the air crews' retinas, or were the plane's spare parts haunted? And who or what did Enid Grigg see in the galley? We may never know. Weird or what?
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In Britain, a near fatal attack on a 10-year-old boy is blamed on a painting. Something that pushed him down the stairs. You know, as I get older, I look for new ways to relax, and I've recently discovered painting. And you take this piece, for example. We have a, a contrast of light and dark colors here and textures. I've created space. Uh, I have characters retreat, uh, into the back of the canvas. And it has no real lines due to its, uh, its, uh, pointless styling. Can you see it? Work like this takes a lot of time and emotion. One gives one's heart and soul to achieve this level of creativity. And that's just what it takes to make great art. Uh, our next story features another equally brilliant artist. He too gave himself to his work, but all he saw was darkness.
Mared Port, England, 1999. Johan Robinson returns home from his grandmother's wake with a peculiar inheritance: a mysterious painting. She owned for decades but inexplicably kept hidden from all but her closest relatives. It's called The Anguished Man. It was my grandmother's painting, and she kept it in her house but locked away. She didn't like it, so she kept it out of sight. But she used to show me it, and I absolutely loved the painting. And of course, when my grandmother passed away, she wanted made out of the painting.
The picture's origins are shrouded in mystery. She got off a family friend. She didn't know the artist's name, where the painting came from, where it originated, or anything. But what Shawn does know sends chills down his spine. According to the legend, The Anguished Man is a self-portrait of a man so tormented, he mutilated himself while creating it. The painting was painted using oils mixed in with the artist's own blood. Even more macabre is what happened once it was completed. When he finished the painting, he committed suicide.
But instead of being sickened, Shawn is excited about owning The Anguished Man. Being brought watching other films, I knew it wasn't real, so I, I didn't believe in the supernatural at all. His wife, Dawn, is horrified. She refuses to have it in the house. So we could to compromise. I could keep the painting, but I could keep it locked away. So we kept it in the cellar, and there it would stay for over a decade, virtually forgotten.
Fast forward to 2010. Sea rediscovers The Anguished Man and decides it's high time the painting takes its rightful place in the family home. I finally persuaded my wife to have the painting in the house, and we put it in the spare bedroom. But Sean's joy is short-lived. An ominous gloom begins to infiltrate their house. There's just a general feeling of unease whenever the painting's in the house. I started having really bad nightmares, and they were all about this painting.
In the days that follow, it becomes clear that bad dreams are the least of Shawn's problems. Although they've lived in the house for years, Shawn and Dawn suddenly begin to hear sounds they've never noticed before. We had like a sobbing sound, like somebody crying. And then we heard loud bangs in the middle of the night, and the sound of like footsteps and creaking. But this only happened when the painting was in the house.
There was one time I was walking upstairs, and I got to the top of the stairs, and all of a sudden, from nowhere, I was surrounded by this strange mist. It was like a thick fog, and at first I thought there was a fire. It seemed like smoke or a fire in the house, and all of then just as suddenly as it came, it vanished, and there was nothing there. I had a good look around the house, looking for anything, couldn't find anything, but it was this definitely happened. The other things could be put down to imagination or hearing noises from outside. This was real.
But what really frightened Shawn occurs when he goes to bed. His nightmares become alarmingly real. I kept seeing this figure at the bottom of the bed. That happened nearly every night. Not only do the strange apparitions continue, they start to target his wife. She woke up one morning and she thought I was getting into bed beside her. She turned around to speak to me, and it wasn't me, it was somebody else. I ran upstairs, and she was in a real state, shaking and crying.
As paranormal activity in his house increases, Sean is convinced he knows its source. We put two and two together and thought these things started happening when we brought the painting into the house. Despite this conclusion, Shawn insists on keeping the painting, that is, until it attacks his child. I just got out of the shower and I was walking downstairs. He felt this force in his back, as if something had pushed him. I could just feel two hands on my back, and I fell down the stairs.
For him, it's the last straw. He decides to lock The Anguished Man away for good. The painting was back in the cellar again. I couldn't take a chance if anybody was in any danger with the painting in the basement. The haunting stopped, but Sean's obsession with The Anguished Man doesn't. He brings it out again. This time, he hopes to capture whatever is tormenting his family on video. I set my video camera up overnight and left it running for about eight hours.
Over the following three nights, Shawn's camera captures remarkable events. First, a series of unexplained signs. Then, a door seems to close on its own, followed by the appearance of a ghostly figure. Finally, Shawn captures something he is sure is the evidence he needs. Someone or something tips over the painting. No explanation for that. The painting was at such an angle, it shouldn't have fell. A lot of people are skeptical, and I can understand that because I was a skeptic myself, and I still am. But the footage is there for you to say it wasn't faked. There could be a perfectly reasonable explanation, but I haven't found one yet.
Despite everything that happened, Shawn still owns The Anguished Man. I want to keep it. I'd love to have it. I know, I think now, since the incident with my son, I don't really want it in the house, just in case. I don't want to put anybody in any danger. Is the ghost of a tortured soul living in a painting in Shawn Robinson's cellar?
Barry Guy is a paranormal investigator. He thinks the Robinson family is the victim of a rare and dangerous type of ghostly visitation: an intelligent haunting. Intelligent hauntings are whereby spirits can interact with the living. They can make themselves known. We can communicate with them. They can move objects on command. They were even able to manifest themselves, so you can see them, communicate with them. Guy claims he knows how The Anguished Man acquired its supernatural power. I think that the painting might have absorbed some kind of energy, the artist's energy. It might well be a case that this, this painting itself has somehow transferred the soul of the artist who was in torment, and it's now affected the family.
Can a painting be haunted by its creator? It is rare to have blood mixed into an oil painting, for example, but it has happened around the world. There are lots of different examples in cultures, at different cultures, especially around the world, that use blood, human blood and animal blood, as a media to paint with. Possibly by using his own blood, and the fact that he was in torment at the time of painting it, all of that emotion is transferred, uh, through electromagnetics, really, you know, it's transferred into the painting. The ghost of this man can actually be, uh, living in the painting, and then, you know, being released from the painting.
G is certain the attack on Shawn's son won't be the last, and the next one could be fatal. The solution is simple: he could destroy the painting. That could be one. He could actually just take the painting outside of the home, remove it from the place he lives in, put it somewhere else, see whether that tries to stop it. Would probably make life a lot easier for him. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So why doesn't he do it? Why don't you listen to the expert, Sean? First, the thing attacks you, then it attacks your wife, and then it almost kills your son, and what do you, you do nothing? Why do people behave like this? Okay, Sean, if you're watching, here's how easy it is.
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Right, see how hard can this be? Yeah. Oh, wrong painting. Did a tormented soul lay trapped inside a canvas until Shawn released it, or does this mystery have a different explanation? There are portals that open up into evil spaces. A family is tormented by apparitions after a man brings home a mysterious painting. Is The Anguished Man haunted?
Psychiatrist Dr. Tracy Latz thinks the real story is even more out there. The Anguished Man is a portal to another world. A portal is a two-way opening or doorway that allows us to enter into or connect to another dimension, be that spiritual, astral, or out in space. This artist had actually used some of his own blood. Now, red blood cells are interesting. It's one of the only cells in the body that as it matures, it takes the nucleus and it extrudes it or spits it out of the cell. So that that cell is governed solely by the consciousness of the person in whom the blood is flowing. From a metaphysical standpoint, blood represents consciousness. And by the artist putting their blood into the paint and then putting it on that canvas, he was actually infusing it with his consciousness.
This startling claim defies all known laws of space and time. So how could it happen? Easy. Dr. Latz believes the artist did it unintentionally by simply focusing emotions as he painted the canvas. Portals are actually much more common than people know or think, because we can open a temporary portal just by saying a prayer, which may actually open up, if we're in our heart, to the spiritual realm.
Did an artist allow an interdimensional traveler to enter the Robinson's home? I feel that there is a being, uh, or entity coming out of the painting that is curious and trying to connect or influence or check out people that it is around. But why would this entity viciously attack Shawn's son? There are portals that open up into darker, what some people would call evil spaces, that may connect with that very low consciousness, like what you would see with serial killers, and that can feel very scary.
Did the painter of The Anguished Man make contact with beings from another dimension, and did one of them cross into our world? Not everyone is so sure. Paranormal Investigator Mike St. Clair specializes in debunking fake haunting videos, and he's seen hundreds. When I look at most of these videos, they're, they're, they're jokes to me. I mean, they're, they're so easily debunked, they're easy to pick apart, because people are doing the same things. They're not doing anything new.
St. Clair says there are a number of gimmicks that amateur filmmakers use to create ghostly effects. You can use strings and and pull objects, and you can hide them with editing. One of the easiest ways to fake a paranormal video is to use a static shot inside of a static shot. You can make things disappear and reappear. You can use poor quality video, low lighting, jumpy, quick-moving video. You can even use actors running past the camera quickly, or tricks like these used by Shawn Robinson. Everything in these videos are easily recreatable, and there's no reason that anyone in the right should believe that there's paranormal activity going on behind this painting.
Is The Anguished Man video a hoax? And if so, how did Sean do it? St. Clair and colleague Jason London are going to replicate an incident from the video: the ghostly door, with just a couple dollars worth of fishing line and some duct tape. You can pull off just about anything. It takes just minutes to set up. This is the tricky part, getting up underneath the door. Oh, we're looking good. We've got our bracket on the wall. So not only can I pull the door shut from here, but I can also use the other string and pull it open as well. So that's going to cut down on the amount of people that you would need to pull something off like this, because it's possible The Anguished Man, it was only him doing the video, so therefore he wouldn't have a lot of people to work, and he had to do it all by himself. And this is a good way of setting something up like this and actually pulling this entire thing off with one person. Let's do some magic.
The results are convincing. Look at that. It's a ghost. We did a better job than he did. St. Clair still believes in ghosts, but he thinks fake hauntings give paranormal sightings a bad name. It's important to expose the frauds and hoaxers because we put our heart and soul into what we do, and we take this field very seriously. Did Sea Robinson fake The Anguished Man videos, or was he visited by a demonic entity that used us a painting as a doorway from a parallel world?
[Music] Weird.
After a devastating earthquake, a New Zealand man is savagely beaten by a phantom. Did a natural disaster release an evil spirit? All I could feel was I was getting strangled. Coming through. You know, when it comes to home renovations, I love to get down and dirty. Who needs a master craftsman when you can do it yourself, huh? There, a new doorway may not be perfect, but who cares? But what have I told told you that all this hard work could open other doors? Doors to things you would never, ever want in your home.
September 1st, 2010. Alan Bennett and his wife Sandra put the finishing touches on their new home in Christchurch, New Zealand. Allan, a successful building contractor, has renovated the two-story house from the ground up. It was quite a smart-looking little cottage, so knock walls out, put walls back, and it stayed the same, really, as the four walls in this room here. The Bennets are still moving in when Allan has a surprise visit from a man he doesn't recognize. He is the son of the origin, but the man doesn't come in. He simply hands Allan a picture. And he guys, weird, tiny black and white photo of the house, right back in the 1930s. Bit of a weird sort of a photo.
Allan accepts the picture, but the gift leaves him with an uneasy feeling. Just something about that photo that wasn't quite right, and the more I looked at it, the more annoyed I got. Allan's uneasiness turns to rage. Finally, he snaps. I just took it off, ripped it in half, threw it in the rubbish. Just didn't make me feel good at all.
Of Alan tries to put the incident behind him, the very next day, all hell breaks loose. Christchurch is shattered by a 7.1 magnitude earthquake, the first major quake to hit the city in almost a century. Oh, it was huge. If you tried to get out of bed, it would knock you over, and there were broken tiles all over the floor and broken glasses, and it went for a lot longer, and the intensity was sort of a lot harder than anything we'd ever felt before. The city suffers widespread destruction and almost $4 billion in damage, including Allan's new house. Well, the house is sunk nearly a foot. We haven't got a window or a door in the house that that opens and shuts properly. Near, they're all jamming, sticking. The building survives, but inside, Allan senses an eerie change. There's something in the air, and it feels like evil. You'd be walking down the hallway or in your bedroom or having a shower, and you'd get this cold just whoosh straight into you and run up your legs, out your head, and your hair. It'd stand there.
Alan hopes that whatever it is will simply go away. Instead, things get worse. We were watching a movie, and the door sort of just moved a bit, and then this thing just whooshed into the room and stood in the room looking at us. Didn't move forward, just disappeared. And we just sort of looked at each other and, what was that? The encounter's become so frightening, Allan and his wife consider leaving, but they've invested too much in the house to simply abandon it. So they stay. It's a decision they'll regret.
At 3:00 a.m., Allan's woken by a terrifying noise. Yeah, just this amazing bang on the side of the bed. The room's dark, the door's shut, there's no light, you know, I can't see anything. I froze, you know, thinking, I know what's next. The answer is difficult to comprehend as Allan watches something begins walking across the bed. You felt the depression in the bottom of the mattress as it stands on the mattress, you know, and you're thinking, he, is it doing this? And then all of a sudden, just pushed me down to the bed. So I'm trying to fight it off. As his wife looks on in horror, Allan is fighting for his life against an invisible attacker. I was getting strangled. I'm trying to fight this thing, strangling the air, and start being sucked into a big plastic bag with a ton of bricks put on you.
But just when Allan is about to give up, the unexpected happens. The violent presence disappears. The attack has left them so shocked, they wonder if they imagined it. But they soon discover the truth. And I had the, the fingerprints around the throat. The bruising and the injuries don't stop there. Soon, Allan finds more evidence that he was assaulted by something real. When I was at work, my son said, "Sh, you back?" I said, "But there's nothing there." To say I didn't want there to be anything, you know. He said, "Now, lift up your shirt." And I said, "So I did." And I had a, a bruise about so big on the back, all with these bins. I went to the doctor, and he said it was an impact bruise.
Looking back, he wonders if the stranger's visit was a warning. Where the fighter's got anything to do with it? I don't know. Like, it will happen within days of me wrapping it up. Today, Allan is yet to come to terms with the attack. I mean, if someone had told me two years ago, you're going to get your bone kicked by a ghost, I would have just laughed. You know, I've often had close encounters with spirits and and and ended up with a hangover, but that was the, the bad old days. This is weird, or what?
First, some strange guy knocks on Allan's door, doesn't even say hello. Then Allan is struck by an invisible force, runs right in his bedroom, doesn't even knock. All this after an earthquake. No wonder Allan's unhappy. Ghosts are usually ghostly. This one came from the school of hard knocks. Was Alan Bennett assaulted by a ghost? And if so, why was he attacked after an earthquake? Can spirits actually cause physical injuries?
Alan was dealing with a demonic entity. A man is savagely beaten in his own bed by an invisible assailant. What attacked him? Christchurch Paranormal Investigator Anton Herrick was hired by the Bennett family to investigate. I had not dealt with a case where a physical attack had taken place and left, you know, ex, you know, extensive marks in the area of the damage, where a witness had been next to the person and had witnessed the attack and couldn't explain it either. Um, so it was the first of that kind, and it really stuck out. Just Allan's fear for, you know, for his safety.
Herrick's investigation led him to a compelling theory. He thinks the Christchurch earthquake did more than damage the city; it released malicious spirits, evidenced by increased reports of paranormal activity. The reports to our website and to my emails and even phone calls began to just increase massively after the youthquake. We couldn't keep up with what was going on. Herrick is convinced one of these spirits lay dormant in Allan Bennett's house until it was awakened by his renovation work. Renovations is well known to spark all kinds of of of paranormal activity. It was very weak, and it was very long in between, so there were the things were happening were were small things, and there were long gaps in between. It sort of two years before the earthquake, Alan was dealing with a demonic entity. This may have been his house, and Alan had already destroyed it and completely rebuilt it.
Herrick thinks when the earthquake occurred, it supercharged the ghost, giving it the power to physically attack. Earthquakes release a lot of energies, a lot of energies that people don't think about, but are very similar to those that are released during haunting. Did the Christchurch earthquake release a ghost that attacked Alan Bennett? Can seismic activity make the spirit in human worlds collide?
Psychologist Annabel Baranoski agrees the earthquake is to blame for Allan's bizarre encounters, but not because it released ghosts. She thinks the quake was so traumatic, it caused Allan to suffer from a condition that often affects people in situations of extreme violence, like soldiers in combat. It's called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. Whenever we're exposed to any significant event, it can absolutely lead to PTSD if we felt horror and terror and the worry of losing our life or being seriously injured. The DSM, our diagnostic statistical manual, that's kind of like the Bible that psychiatrists and psychologists use when they are, uh, trying to do a diagnosis with a client. And in fact, PTSD was only first put into the DSM in 1980, so it's a, it is actually a fairly new term. And when I was doing my work, it was fairly new in terms of treatment. I mean, really, what was happening is people were starting to develop a lot of their, uh, their interventions and, um, assessment protocols for actually working with people who were trauma survivors.
Known as shell shock during World War I, PTSD has long been the most common psychiatric problem facing soldiers, but only since the Vietnam War has the condition been treated as a serious health issue, especially as it can last for decades. I do a lot of work with, um, with military members. These individuals might have experienced something 20 years ago, and I'm only seeing them for the very first time right now.
Do Baronowski says Allan's ghostly visions could be explained by one of PTSD's symptoms: violent nightmares and flashbacks. Allan has been flooded with thoughts and memories, images, and anything that's a reminder of the trauma creates this explosion, this kind of cascade of, uh, physiological, emotional, behavioral responses. Did mental trauma cause Alan to imagine a brutal encounter with a ghost? And if so, how does it explain his physical injuries?
Dr. Joe Fischer is a professor of physiology at the University of Toronto. He too thinks the earthquake released something that caused Allan's visions, something deadlier than any apparition: a poison so stealthy, you're unaware it's affecting you until it's too late. Carbon monoxide is a gas. It's, uh, completely tasteless and odorless, and, uh, you can't see it. It's colorless, and it's something that diffuses into the air. Carbon monoxide is released when any kind of fuel burns without getting enough oxygen. Carbon monoxide is the commonest cause of death and sickness from poisoning in the world. What makes it so dangerous is an affinity for the hemoglobin molecules in our blood that carry oxygen to the body and the brain. In the presence of carbon monoxide, the hemoglobin takes up the carbon monoxide rather than the oxygen. So it is very toxic. You need just tiny amounts of it to poison all your hemoglobin.
But does this explain Allan's violent haunting? Dr. Fischer is convinced carbon monoxide was making him see and hear things that simply weren't there. One of the, uh, syndromes that they get from their carbon monoxide poisoning is a sort of neuros psychiatric syndrome where they could have, you know, chronic hallucinations and, and other things. And this is even in the absence of any more carbon monoxide poisoning. And people are quite disabled with this, you know, they have difficulty finding a job, working, uh, family relationships, and other things because of these neuropsychiatric syndromes that are basically not really treatable.
Was Allen's house infiltrated by gas? Fisher's theory is even more compelling when you consider where it comes from. Earthquakes actually do release carbon monoxide, and that's one of the ways that satellites pick up where earthquakes have occurred. Hallucinations caused by carbon monoxide? It's a convincing theory, but there's just one problem: how does it explain Allan's bruises? He was confused, hallucinating, bumped into things, or scared, uh, of of what was happening, and, uh, started flailing around, maybe hurt himself in some way.
Did carbon monoxide gas poison Alan Bennett's mind? Could post-traumatic stress be responsible for his paranormal attacks, or was a demonic spirit released by a seismic shock wave? Weird or what?
So there we have it. Stories of hauntings of everyday objects from all over the world. In Florida, the pilots of a crashed plane return from the grave to haunt Eastern Airlines flights. In Britain, a mysterious portrait is haunted by the soul of its creator. And in New Zealand, an earthquake releases a ghost that attacks a man in bed. Are these bizarre stories evidence that inanimate objects can harbor the spirits of the dead? You decide. Join me next time for more stories that will undoubtedly be weird or what?
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